Target: Rabaul: The Allied Siege of Japan's Most Infamous Stronghold, March 1943 - August 1945

by Bruce Gamble

  Wilkins was enthusiastic about the plan, especially since “Jock” Henebry, recently promoted to operations officer of the 3rd Group, would be the mission commander. “It sounded like everybody in the Fifth Air Force was paving the way for the 3rd Group,” Webster recalled, “and that the 8th Squadron should really score well in our role as clean-up batters.”

  The two friends attended another briefing that night, during which the plan was confirmed. Henebry would lead the anti-shipping portion of the strike with the 90th Squadron in the van, followed by Maj. Arthur Small and the 13th Squadron a minute behind them, then by Wilkins and the 8th Squadron. The B-25s would drop down to mast height after zooming between The Mother and The North Daughter on Crater Peninsula. They would come off their targets on a southeasterly heading, letting them race directly out of the harbor and turn for home.

  The mission had the potential for a knockout punch, a real haymaker. ADVON believed the Japanese aerial forces had been reduced to only fifty serviceable fighters and perhaps thirty bombers at Rabaul and the satellite bases. These estimates were based on photographs taken after the midday raid on October 29—but that information was now three days old. Additional photo runs had been prevented by consecutive days of bad weather, including a frontal system on November 1 that extended “from zero to infinity” over New Britain.

  As fate would have it, strong reinforcements had arrived at Rabaul during the blackout. Shocked by the severity of the Allied attacks on Rabaul and Bougainville in mid-October, Admiral Koga had finally ordered two heavy cruisers and a squadron of destroyers to Rabaul from Truk. The warships arrived on October 21, according to Capt. Tameichi Hara.

  Additionally, after Kusaka reported the enemy invasion fleet off the Treasuries on October 27, and signaled his low aircraft readiness, Koga decided to follow the example set by Yamamoto with I-Go Sakusen. Anticipating an amphibious assault at Buin or the Shortlands, he ordered Admiral Ozawa to shift the planes of the 1st Carrier Division temporarily to Rabaul. By doing so, he provided Kusaka with enough land-based aircraft to defend the stronghold and strike at the enemy invaders. Days later, on November 1, approximately 150 aircraft from three veteran carriers—Shokaku, Zuikaku, and Zuiho—arrived at Rabaul for the new offensive. Koga called it “Ro Operation.”

  In the opinion of Hara, commander of Destroyer Division 2, the reinforcements were inadequate. Disappointed with the Imperial Navy leadership in late 1943, the outspoken Hara wrote years later that Koga “had done practically nothing” as commander-in-chief of the Combined Fleet, and that Ozawa had achieved “no great victories” as a carrier commander. Along with many of his fellow officers in the Eighth Fleet, Hara resented that Koga had kept the “big ships”—battleships and aircraft carriers—in the relatively safe waters of Truk Lagoon and the Home Islands. The warships of the Eighth Fleet, meanwhile, especially the destroyers, were constantly risked on “unglamorous transport missions” and bore the brunt of the battles in the Solomons.

  One night in early October, when the sake flowed at a gala party, Kusaka mentioned that the average life expectancy of a Rabaul-based destroyer was “something under two months.” This fueled resentment among the destroyer captains. Hara was therefore unimpressed by the small fleet dispatched from Truk by Admiral Koga. “This followed the familiar Yamamoto pattern of piecemeal reinforcement,” he later wrote. “It was a move which Koga would have cause to regret.”

  IN WIDELY SCATTERED revetments around the Dobodura complex, nearly eighty strafer crews sat in their B-25s on the morning of November 1 and waited for the signal to start engines. After two tension-filled hours, they were told to return to their camps. Uncooperative weather all the way across the Solomon Sea had scrubbed the mission. The next morning the crews repeated the routine, arising at 0400 to eat a light breakfast of rehydrated food, canned juice, and strong coffee. The atmosphere inside the mess hall turned hazy as most of the flyboys lit unfiltered Lucky Strikes.

  The air inside the briefing tent was similar, but with more tension. After pulling back the screen to show Rabaul, the intelligence officers referred to photographs obtained the previous afternoon by an F-5 Lightning. More than three hundred enemy planes had been counted among the airdromes. “The morning briefing conducted prior to takeoff was a very somber affair,” recalled Lt. Richard L. Walker, a pilot in the 13th Squadron/3rd Bomb Group. “Hearing the latest word on the extent of the Japanese defenses was pretty much a prediction that all of us would not be coming home. The twelve crews that were assigned to fly the mission sat grey faced and quiet during the briefing.”

  The news presented that morning was incomplete. The briefing officers were unaware that a powerful fleet of ten warships had departed Simpson Harbor on the afternoon of November 1—but they would be back by the time the air strike commenced.

  Two hundred and fifty miles southeast of Rabaul, the invasion of Bougainville had commenced as planned on the morning of November 1 and caught the Japanese by surprise. Koga had anticipated a frontal assault against the southern tip of the island, but Halsey’s amphibious fleet began landing the 3rd Marine Division and 2nd Raider Regiment at Torokina Point in Empress Augusta Bay, on the isolated west coast.

  As the invasion unfolded, the Eleventh Air Fleet launched three attacks from Rabaul totaling more than one hundred aircraft. The raids caused little harm to the invading ships (the worst damage was a near-miss that killed two sailors and wounded five aboard the destroyer Wadsworth). Sixteen Zeros failed to return. Three dive-bombers were missing, two crash-landed with severe damage, and two more suffered lesser damage.

  Later that night the ten warships out of Rabaul—heavy cruisers Haguro and Myoko, light cruisers Agano and Sendai, and six destroyers—steamed southeastward toward Halsey’s transports. Vice Adm. Sentaro Omori didn’t expect an opposing surface fleet, but Rear Adm. Aaron S. “Tip” Merrill, with four light cruisers and eight destroyers of Task Force 39, had received timely reports from patrol planes and was already approaching Omori’s fleet.

  The clash, known as the Battle of Empress Augusta Bay, began at about 0230 on November 2. Upon sighting one of Merrill’s destroyer divisions, Rear Admiral Ijuin aboard Sendai commenced radical turns. The light cruiser nearly collided with Hara’s Shigure, missing Shigure’s stern by a mere ten feet; moments later, to Hara’s dismay, Sendai “walked into the very first salvo from the American cruisers.” Each of the Cleveland-class cruisers had a main battery of twelve six-inch guns, aimed with remarkable accuracy by radar. Shells from the initial salvo crashed into Sendai, which lost steerage, her rudder jammed over. Two of the trailing Japanese destroyers, trying to avoid Sendai, collided violently.

  As the battle progressed, dozens of torpedoes fanned through the warm waters. One blew the stern off an American destroyer. Low-hanging clouds and smoke reflected the brilliant light of star shells, a phantasm of colorful geysers formed as thousands of shells created towering columns of spray. The complex battle raged for two hours, with Omori catching the worst of it. One destroyer, Hatsukaze, sank with all hands; Sendai sank as well, with only a few of her crew rescued, and both heavy cruisers sustained minor damage. Merrill got away with damage to one cruiser and two destroyers.

  Omori retired his battle-scarred ships to Rabaul that morning, his sailors exhausted, their mood foul. The sun was rising toward midday by the time the warships swung from mooring stations, their sharp bows pointed eastward on the incoming tide. The crews desperately needed rest, but they wouldn’t get it. Whitehead’s maximum effort strike was already well on its way.

  THE STRAFER CREWS had manned their aircraft soon after sunrise, then sat for hours again inside the metal cocoons, roasting in the rising heat and humidity. The delay ended with a favorable weather report from another F-5 over Rabaul. By 1120, all three groups of B-25s had rendezvoused over the “Gona wreck” landmark and were headed outbound. The nine squadrons had combined to put approximately seventy-five bombers in the air, several of which later turned back because of mech
anical issues. Exactly three weeks earlier, at the beginning of the offensive, a maximum effort by eight squadrons had yielded 115 strafers. The same reduction affected the P-38 squadrons, which could muster only eighty Lightnings this day compared to 125 fighters on October 12. Attrition was affecting both sides.

  Other than the mechanical dropouts, which included three B-25s from Wilkins’ squadron, the formation crossed the Solomon Sea without difficulty. Spread out at altitudes from one to three thousand feet beneath scattered rainsqualls, the strafers and fighters proceeded up Saint George’s Channel. Instead of cutting across the Gazelle Peninsula, the formation continued up the channel. Squadron leaders kicked their twin rudders from side to side, causing the lead B-25s to fishtail: this was the signal for the elements to spread out and test fire their guns. Afterward, they formed back into tight vees, knowing the fight would soon be on. And there would be no element of surprise this time. “The Japanese were now using the newfangled radar and a network of observation lookouts that would warn of our coming,” mission leader Henebry later wrote. “The target was too well protected to sneak up on it.”

  Weather conditions were decent enough for Japanese spotters on New Britain and New Ireland to see or hear the formation. And two ships were sighted in Saint George’s Channel about twenty-five miles from Rabaul. Describing them as “destroyers,” a ubiquitous label applied to numerous classes of Japanese warships, Henebry figured the two vessels had alerted the defenses at Rabaul. Other airmen reported the ships with varying descriptions, including a P-38 pilot who noted: “One destroyer and one merchant vessel were in St. George’s Channel as we passed through. Their [antiaircraft] fire was ineffective.”

  The formation rounded Cape Gazelle and turned northwest. Although Henebry was the overall mission leader, the four squadrons of the 345th Bomb Group, the so-called “neutralizing force,” were at the front of the pack. Led by Maj. Benjamin W. Fridge, the group’s deputy commander, they forged ahead to establish the necessary separation, accompanied by the P-38s of 431st and 432nd Fighter Squadrons.* Swooping at minimum altitude over tiny Kabagon Island, the B-25s continued northwest, remaining abeam of Crater Peninsula as they approached the ingress point: the saddle between The Mother and North Daughter volcanoes.

  Around 1330, the two fighter sweep squadrons peeled off toward Lakunai airdrome and the harbor. The sixteen Lightnings of the 80th Fighter Squadron, led by Maj. Edward “Porky” Cragg, soon faced more Zeros than they could count. As the squadron’s history later stated: “The Japs sent up the largest number of planes ever encountered by this squadron. A conservative estimate placed the number of airborne enemy planes at sixty, but many of the pilots maintained there were more than a hundred Jap planes in the air.”

  The estimate was correct: well over a hundred Zeros had scrambled from Lakunai, Vunakanau, and Tobera. In fact, many of the Zero pilots were engaging in their second big battle of the day. Soon after sunrise that morning, Kusaka had sent eighteen Vals and eighty-nine Zeros to attack the enemy invasion fleet in Empress Augusta Bay. Six of the obsolescent dive-bombers had failed to return, but the Zeros returned intact—and most were serviced by the time the American air strike approached.

  A majority of the fighters from the Eleventh Air Fleet, as well as those from Zuikaku and Zuiho, were parked at Lakunai. For unknown reasons, the airdrome received little or no warning of the air attack. According to author and historian Osamu Tagaya, the Zeros “would have gotten hammered on the ground had it not been for the alertness of a lookout.” Manning the wooden control tower at Lakunai, the sharp-eyed spotter happened to point his long-range telescope to the east and saw Fridge’s B-25s passing east of Crater Peninsula. The lookout sounded the air raid alarm by beating a metal container—a warning as ancient as the castles of the samurai warlords—and seconds later the leader of the Zuiho fighter unit bolted from the alert shack, yelling at his fellow pilots to start their engines.

  Some of the Zeros were still taking off when the P-38s flew overhead, which initially placed the units from Lakunai at a disadvantage. In the fighter community, speed and altitude are essential elements for both victory and survival. Fortunately for the Japanese, the Shokaku fighters at Vunakanau were already airborne, along with one D4Y Suisei carrying aerial burst bombs. So was Group 253, out of Tobera, some of its Zeros also carrying Type 3 bombs. Altogether, Air Groups 201, 204, and 253 of the Eleventh Air Fleet scrambled fifty-seven Zeros, while the Shokaku, Zuikaku, and Zuiho fighter units added fifty-eight. The presence of 115 interceptors came as a shock to the attackers.

  Cragg’s 80th Fighter Squadron was immediately embroiled in a desperate fight. One noncommissioned pilot, Flight Officer Willis F. Evers, was picked off over the southern rim of the caldera. His element leader led a dive into a gaggle of enemy fighters at four thousand feet, after which no one saw Evers again. Later, the wreckage of his fighter was discovered. The Lightning had hit the ground at such tremendous speed that the engines and cockpit tub augered fifteen feet into the volcanic soil.

  Near where Evers crashed, the 80th Squadron also lost 2nd Lt. Norman Shea, last seen near Rapopo airdrome. In his case, no discovery of a wreck site has been made. Meanwhile, the remaining members of the squadron fought for their lives. No further losses were sustained by Cragg’s pilots, whose coordination and gunnery resulted in claims for the destruction of fourteen enemy fighters. But in an odd coincidence, a regulation had gone into effect that very day that required all claims for the destruction of enemy planes in aerial combat to be accompanied by a statement from an eyewitness. Because of the new regulation, six of the fourteen claims were disallowed.

  While the 80th Squadron fought intense battles at low altitude, the thirteen pilots of the 39th Squadron encountered minimal action at their assigned altitude of eight to thirteen thousand feet. Initially, a lieutenant with the lyrical name of Hamilton H. Salmon had trouble “skinning” his belly tanks, so he withdrew a few miles from the area before finally releasing them. Soon after reentering the fray at a lower altitude, he splashed one enemy plane from dead astern, scoring the squadron’s only victory of the day.

  WHILE THE FIGHTER sweep pulled some of the Japanese fighters out of the target area, Fridge led the 345th Group in a wide turn and lined up on the gap between the tall peaks of The North Daughter and Mother volcanoes. The lowest point in the saddle was known as Namanula Hill, over which a paved road rose steeply from the village of Nodup on eastern shore of the peninsula. Cresting between the volcanoes at an elevation of several hundred feet, the road descended back to sea level in the span of just a mile. To follow that contour, the B-25 pilots would first have to haul back on the control column for about fifteen seconds, and then shove the nose over in a steep dive to swoop down on their targets.

  After separating into individual squadrons, the eight gunships of the 498th blasted through the saddle, then pushed over in a stomach-churning drop and opened fire on the eastern fringe of Chinatown. Bomb bay doors snapped open as the B-25s fanned out into a line abreast, the center ships flying straight down Malaguna Road just a hundred feet up. Pilots held their left index fingers on the triggers, pounding away with their nose guns, while copilots toggled dozens of parafrags over the business district and wharf. On the extreme left, Lt. Milford M. Magee found himself over the harbor, which provide an unexpected opportunity to strafe and bomb a four-engine Type 2 flying boat (Kawanishi H8K “Emily”). He then strafed two cargo ships tied alongside wharves. The lead aircraft of the three-plane element, piloted by Maj. Chester A. Coltharp, flew directly over the Emily and the two small freighters. Photographs taken from the rear-facing cameras of both B-25s clearly show their parafrags drifting down, moments before exploding on or near the big seaplane.

  As the first squadron to hit the township, the 498th encountered only sporadic antiaircraft fire. The radio aerial was knocked off Coltharp’s aircraft and the aerial mast shot off Fridge’s lead B-25; otherwise the squadron cleared the target virtually untouched.

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sp; A minute behind the 499th’s exploding parafrags, the ten B-25s of the 500th Squadron raced through the saddle and spread out across Rabaul. Like the squadron before them, they flew due west, heavily strafing the same area and dropping dozens of phosphorus bombs. The detonation of each hundred-pound device produced a cloud of dense white smoke and streamers of burning flakes, which spread across a wide radius and ignited anything combustible. Personnel hit by the fiery particles were often terribly burned, for the flakes would stick to the skin and continue to burn until the phosphorus was exhausted or deprived of oxygen.

  During the 500th Squadron’s bomb run, the Japanese gunners improved their accuracy. Antiaircraft fire, possibly a single burst, hit two adjacent B-25s in their most vulnerable spot: the still-loaded bomb bay. Captain Max Mortensen, whose squadron lost two planes on October 18, had already released eight of his phosphorous bombs when the flak struck his aircraft. Four bombs were still in the racks, and at least one of the casings had been punctured. Dense white smoke filled the fuselage and was even vacuumed through the wing to the right engine, making it appear to be on fire. Quickly feathering the prop, Mortensen toggled the remaining bombs, but a smoldering, fizzling device remained stuck. Reassessing the engine, which checked out, Mortensen un-feathered the prop and set the controls for full power. This allowed him to keep pace with the squadron, despite the failure of one bomb bay door. (Hours later, when Mortensen landed at Dobodura, segments of the bomb bay had been burned away—a testament to the powerful effects of concentrated phosphorous.)

  The crew of the other B-25 hit by ground fire had no escape. Flying on Mortensen’s right wing, Lt. Alfred R. Krasnickas had not released his payload when shrapnel hit the bomb bay. One or more of the freakish bombs ignited, creating a hellish scene inside the fuselage. Mercifully, it lasted less than a minute. Engulfed in a swirling white cloud, the B-25 rolled over and plunged into a coconut grove three miles west of Rabaul.